With increasing demand for more information to be supplied to homes and/or businesses, network providers are constantly adding, expanding, upgrading, and/or switching their networks to improve overall optical communications network(s). Optical communications networks typically offer high-speed voice, video, and data transmission between users, such as providers, residential homes, businesses, government agents, and/or networks. Conventional optical networks include, but not limited to, fiber to the node/neighborhood (“FTTN”), fiber to the curb (“FTTC”), fiber to the building (“FTTB”), fiber to the home (“FTTH”), fiber to the premises (“FTTP”), or other edge location to which a fiber network extends. With increasing speed and capacity, optical networking becomes an integral part of digital communications network. To improve versatility of the optical network, various optical devices such as wave-division multiplexing (“WDM”) elements have been developed to manipulate optical signals, such as routing, splitting, merging, and/or dropping optical signals.
To route optical signals between various optical nodes or devices, a WDM system, for example, may be employed to handle optical routing. The WDM system, for certain applications, is able to multiplex a number of optical signals with different wavelengths onto a single optical fiber. A wavelength may also be referred as a frequency or a color capable of traveling across an optical fiber. Different wavelengths, for instance, can be generated by different lasers. With a WDM network environment, a typical fiber may be configured to carry multiple sets of network traffic using different traffic wavelengths. For instance, a fiber can be configured up to 88 channels wherein each channel can transmit a specific type of wavelength containing optical information.
A conventional network includes multiple nodes. Each node is typically coupled with other nodes via one or more connections such as optical fibers and/or electrical cables. Since each fiber or optical fiber can carry multiple sets of frequencies or degrees of data traffic, inter-office fiber optic cabling at the node can be complicated. For example, a typical optical node can handle multiple degrees of data traffic using multiple fibers or fiber jumpers to route and/or process optical signals.
A problem associated with a typical optical network is that the connections between ports for facilitating traffic flow is predominantly provisioned as the static or permanent connections or links between network elements. A drawback associated with the static connection is that establishing a static link for handling short lived (hours, minutes, and/or seconds) connections, also known as “On Demand” services, is not the best approach to utilize the network resource.